Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

What a difference a year makes—or so suggests British critic Kevin Jackson in Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. That was the year both James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published; after that, Jackson says, art and literature were never quite the same. But those tent poles of the modernist movement were not the only avant-garde artistic...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

There’s no denying that book publishing has weathered some blows in these first years of the new millennium, what with the closing of many brick-and-mortar stores, the rise of eBooks and the sagging economy in general. A more vibrant, hopeful era in the book trade is depicted in Boris Kachka’s Hothouse, the story of the eccentric, scrappy publishing house Farrar, Straus &...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

When thousands make the annual pilgrimage to Washington next month to see the magnificent cherry blossoms, they will be the beneficiaries of the urban vision of one man Pierre Charles L'Enfant. While L'Enfant himself couldn't have envisioned the Japanese trees, much less the presidential monuments or war memorials that we have come to associate with our nation's capital, they are now part of a...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Linguist Nicholas Ostler would appear to be that singular type of British scholar who combines daunting erudition with an equal measure of eccentricity (one of the two dozen or so languages he knows is Chibcha, an ancient South American tongue). It takes a fertile and curious mind to produce an impressive linguistic survey like Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a weighty...